Thank you, Emily Hall. If you hadn’t contacted me – through Myspace (that long ago) – to ask if I was interested in writing words for a children’s opera, I am not sure whether I would have written much more poetry. Before then, it had largely stopped happening. The opera didn’t happen either, but I showed you some lyrics, you set them to music, and then I started to write new words meant to be sung. We wrote a song cycle about love, then one about losing and then having a baby. Although I started writing Life Cycle as a male-female duet, you rightly insisted it all be the woman’s voice. And so I added ‘The gap so small’, ‘Not just milk’ and ‘The first turn’ to poems already written. The earliest, ‘Stillborn’, woke me in the night. I dreamed it for two friends, Jacqui and Steve, and for their daughter, Marnie. ‘Amnio’ arrived after a pregnancy scan for my second son. His bones glowed in cross-section. This was a brief period, before babies in the womb were visualised as 3-D putty putti. Some of the poems I’ve written since were written as poems – not to be sung, and so not for you. But I have kept writing about parenthood and its losses. ‘Self-Reminders’ was written as just that – as a parent speaking to themself. ‘Awaying’ is one parent speaking to another, reassuring them they still exist. More separate is ‘Friday’ – one of the poems that come along in an anti-lyrical way, although I’m mostly (as you’ve made me) that strange half-and-half thing, a lyric poet. ‘Friday’ got written while teaching an Arvon course at the Hurst in Shropshire (the playwright John Osborne’s dank house, before it was exorcised by hope and made luxurious). I stood under a tree near the pond alongside which Osborne used to recline, and send his empties off to go splosh. The bottles were still there, beneath frog-spawn. I saw the image for ‘A glow-in-the-dark skeleton’ whilst walking near The Golden Hinde. I’m so stupid. It was only in choosing a title for a possible collection that I realised I had two glow-in-the-dark skeleton poems: prepartum and postmortem. Very often, I have no idea where what I’ve written has come from; almost always, though, I know exactly where it’s going.